I said that before I ended I would just touch on the question of classical education, and I will keep my word.  Even if literature is to retain a large place in our education, yet Latin and Greek, say the friends of progress, will certainly have to go.  Greek is the grand offender in the eyes of these gentlemen.  The attackers of the established course of study think that against Greek, at any rate, they have irresistible arguments.  Literature may perhaps be needed in education, they say; but why on earth should it be Greek literature?  Why not French or German?  Nay, “has not an Englishman models in his own literature of every kind of excellence?” As before, it is not on any weak pleadings of my own that I rely for convincing the gainsayers; it is on the constitution of human nature itself, and on the instinct of self-preservation in humanity.  The instinct for beauty is set in human nature, as surely as the instinct for knowledge is set there, or the instinct for conduct.  If the instinct for beauty is served by Greek literature and art as it is served by no other literature and art, we may trust to the instinct of self-preservation in humanity for keeping Greek as part of our culture.  We may trust to it for even making the study of Greek more prevalent than it is now.  Greek will come, I hope, some day to be studied more rationally than at present; but it will be increasingly studied as men increasingly feel the need in them for beauty, and how powerfully Greek art and Greek literature can serve this need.  Women will again study Greek, as Lady Jane Grey[134] did; I believe that in that chain of forts, with which the fair host of the Amazons are now engirdling our English universities, I find that here in America, in colleges like Smith College in Massachusetts, and Vassar College in the State of New York, and in the happy families of the mixed universities out West, they are studying it already.

Defuit una mihi symmetria prisca,—­“The antique symmetry was the one thing wanting to me,” said Leonardo da Vinci; and he was an Italian.  I will not presume to speak for the Americans, but I am sure that, in the Englishman, the want of this admirable symmetry of the Greeks is a thousand times more great and crying than in any Italian.  The results of the want show themselves most glaringly, perhaps, in our architecture, but they show themselves, also, in all our art. Fit details strictly combined, in view of a large general result nobly conceived; that is just the beautiful symmetria prisca of the Greeks, and it is just where we English fail, where all our art fails.  Striking ideas we have, and well executed details we have; but that high symmetry which, with satisfying and delightful effect, combines them, we seldom or never have.  The glorious beauty of the Acropolis at Athens did not come from single fine things stuck about on that hill, a statue here, a gateway there;—­no, it arose from all things being perfectly combined for a supreme total